tl;dr: Try out telecast.company ; share your complaints/gripes on GitHub . 2005 birthed the iPod Video and YouTube . 20 years later… it's 2025. Compare YouTube against the podcast (iPod broadcast) ecosystem. YouTube pisses off its creators, fuels a clickbait thumbnail arms-race, and fosters addiction (protip: disable recommendations ). Podcasters thrive in an ecosystem of interviews, educational content, and long-form journalism. Okay, this is a bit unfair. Trash podcasts exist. Q...

I was compelled to install the confusingly-named, generic-sounding, un-hyphenated Shop application on my mobile telephonic device recently, for specific reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. It’s also beyond the scope of the previous post about HTML fractions , which had nothing to do with shopping whatsoever. Thank you Ruben, that clarification was exceptional in its utility. This coffee shop just started playing ABBA, and now all I can think of is that I need a man after mid...

txtar is a tiny plain-text archive format Russ Cox introduced in 2018 for multi-file test fixtures. The Go Playground, cmd/go's script tests, gopls's marker tests, and rsc.io/rf all reach for it. txtar is a tiny plain-text archive format Russ Cox introduced in 2018 for multi-file test fixtures. The Go Playground, cmd/go's script tests, gopls's marker tests, and rsc.io/rf all reach for it.

Painted blast door at a Minuteman II missile silo, via Wikipedia. Welcome to the reading list, a list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at trapped buildings, in-home data centers, cardboard military drones, Brightline’s potential bankruptcy, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items: In this week’s newsletter about how early inventions could ha...

Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago , in 2020. I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection. I know there are other speaker manufacturers with wireless speakers, but to my knowledge, Apple was just using AirPlay over WiFi... so how does it work? Through the magic of buying two HomePods mini (pictured above), I found out. A video detailing the process is embedded be...

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use "all of the capacity of their Colossus data center". As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote , that's the one with the particularly bad environmental record . The gas turbines installed to power the facility initially ran without Clean Air Act permits or pollution control devices, which they got away with by classifyi...

Marc Andreessen Egg Game Marc Andreessen Egg Game is a game about doodling on eggs to make them look like Marc Andreessen. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/marc-andreessen-egg-game Marc Andreessen Egg Game Marc Andreessen Egg Game is a game about doodling on eggs to make them look like Marc Andreessen. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/marc-andreessen-eg...

Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further. Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child...

NVIDIA closed fiscal year 2026 with 42,000 full-time employees and generated $5.14 million in revenue per worker, more than double Apple’s figure and nearly triple Microsoft’s. The chip designer added 6,000 staff over the past year, a 16.67% jump driven by AI infrastructure demand. This post covers NVIDIA’s workforce size, growth, pay structure, demographics, geographic split, turnover, and how the company stacks up against other tech giants. NVIDIA Employee Statistics – TLDR NVID...

Just a little over ten years ago , I was notified about a big warehouse of manuals that was going to be discarded in a few days. Bursting with energy, I drove down, discussed things with the owner, and, soliciting and ringing a very loud bell, assembled dozens of people and tens of thousands of dollars over the course of saving this collection from being discarded. Naturally, the next step would simply be to digitize them all. That took longer. As of a short time ago, a collection of 13,000 ma...

In Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments I argued that left-wing anti-AI sentiment 1 is partly a backlash to two unrelated events around the rise of ChatGPT: the crypto mania of 2022 and the pro-Donald-Trump push many big tech CEOs made in 2024. If the timing had been different, we could have had a real pro-AI faction on the left. What would that look like? I’m not going to respond to any of the popular anti-AI arguments (I’ve already done that here ). I think it’s more i...

The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use of submarines in combat; these were primitive machines with very limited operating endurance and navigational capabilities. These submarines were more like torpedoes: you pointed...

Right now there’s a cruise ship parked outside Cabo Verde because of an outbreak of Andes virus . Yep, another cruise ship. I don’t get the appeal. It’s like a big open-air serial passage experiment: you get a bunch of old people with failing immune systems in close contact and race a pathogen through them. How much should I worry about this? Is this early January of 2020? I tried asking Claude but the biosecurity filter kept blocking my queries. The WHO says : Alth...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nicola Losito, whose blog can be found at nicolalosito.it . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Nicola Losito. Born in the mi...

Wars aren’t won by those with most cause, but whose story’s best told. Join us at the Tournament of Harrenhal! We are thrilled to announce (albeit later than intended) tickets are on sale for Game of Thrones: The Mad King, a new stage production, opening at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon this summer. The world premiere begins Monday, July 20, and runs through Saturday, September 5. A sweeping new stage epic from the world of George R. R. Martin, scripted by Dun...

In the wake of copy.fail , there are more vulnerabilities that have been announced: Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo Dirty Frag Right now would be one of the best times for a supply chain attack via NPM to hit hard. Outside of Linux kernel patches from your distro, I think it's probably a good idea to put a moratorium on installing new software for a week or so. In the wake of copy.fail , there are more vulnerabilities that hav...

Hey you, start communicating! by David Jamieson David talks about why it's good to reach out to authors when you read their content. Even if it's just to say hi. Read post ➡ Hard agree with David's comments here - he and I regularly exchange emails, actually. I try to reach out to authors whenever I read something that resonates with me. I'll also try to share their work via posts like this too. For me, blogging is the original social network; just because we're on our own spaces doesn't mea...

Artemis updates The bulk of the SLS rocket core stage for the Artemis III mission is seen here arriving at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I love the scale of the image being so apparent with people and cars around. Image: NASA / Glenn Benson Science communicator Hank Green made this interactive website of photos spread across the timeline of the Artemis II lunar mission and flyby . Among the technological checkpoints passed by Artemis II, the NASA-MIT-developed optical laser comm...

The Canvas learning management system was hacked a couple of days ago, so this seems like a good time to point out that extortion, if it’s professional enough, is indistinguishable from any other fee-for-service arrangement. The victim pays for the return of something that was theirs, the captor provides a guarantee of safety, intermediaries take a cut, and everyone has an interest in the transaction completing cleanly. In 1994, when the FARC guerrilla organization in Colombia was near the h...

The steam of the espresso machine — of focusing in the milk to make sure it is just right, of tapping to remove the bubbles, of preparing. Soft instrumental music plays in the background, more upbeat than the music to which I was listening earlier — easing me more into the day. How the smile of a barista lights up my day. Of noticing the care and attention put into the latte art. I have not been to a coffee shop in days, and so this morning – a morning where a drizzle of rain hung over the...

I really, really want local models to work. I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent, pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do not immediately switch back to a hosted API after five minutes. There are a lot of reasons why I want this, but the biggest quite frankly is that we’re so early with this stuff, and the thought of locking all the experimentation away from the average developer really upsets me. Frustrating...

Steering Zig Fmt May 8, 2026 Two tips on using zig fmt effectively. Read this if you are writing Zig, or if you are implementing a code formatter. For me, zig fmt is better than any other formatter I used: rustfmt , the one in IntelliJ, deno fmt . zig fmt is steerable. For every syntactic construct, it has several variations for how it might be laid out. The variation used is selected by looking at what’s currently in a file. Easier to show a pair of examples: f(...

Suppose that x is a variable of an unsigned type. In C/C++, it could be of type size_t for example. You have an expression like 6 * x and you want to know whether 6 * x overflows. That is, you want to know if 6 * x exceeds the range of values that can be represented by the type. In most cases, a variable of type size_t will be about to represent all values in the range [0, 2^64-1] . Instead of 64, let me use a variable for the number of bits: [0, 2^L-1] . The easiest approach i...